Long talk between Denise and I about Christian community and the feeling of significance.

Joe Thorn’s post really has me thinking. If I were to stop blogging, stop my adult Bible study class, and give my ministry what the majority of those in chapel WANT, I would be virtually be finished making any public ministry contribution at all. (I’d be left teaching Bible classes to high schoolers and English to the AP kids.) I blog because I want to. I teach an adult Bible study so that those who come to work here will have something on a bit higher level than the typical Sunday School class. And any poll would indicate that the majority of those who hear me in chapel would prefer less preaching, more music, more video, more prizes, more animal acts, etc.

(The preachers in the room will know about this one: it’s astounding what people will walk up to you and say about preaching. Any time I drop a sermon in favor of music, there are people who kiss my feet and say things like “I’m soooooo glad we didn’t have to listen to another sermon.”)

I have a recurring dream that I am sure many preachers have. I am up front, talking, and people are leaving. Not in masse, but in groups or one at a time. They have somewhere else to be, something more important to do. I continue talking, and the room gets emptier and emptier and emptier. You want to make it stop, but you can’t. The most frightening moment of all comes as you realize what is happening, and that everyone wants to leave. You are faced with a terrible choice: Stop and acknowledge what is happening, and thereby admit failure. Or ignore it, somehow, and keep talking, fighting off the onslaught of truth that is right in front of you.

One of the effects of 16 years in a ministry where the vast majority of my ministry is spend leading compulsory chapel and teaching compulsory Bible classes is that you realize you are that person talking, talking, talking, but almost everyone wants out.

The problem I am having is that I am losing the ability to think “Christianly” through all of this. I don’t want to delude myself about what I am doing. I want the truth about myself and the value of my writing, speaking and teaching. If I’m done, and just rattling on, I want to know. I don’t want to be like a man who came here as a retired professor and did chapel for a year almost every day. He had once been a prominent professor in one of our Baptist colleges. Now he gave the same talks, right out of his Greek New Testament, to sleeping high school and middle school students who had no idea who he was or what they were getting. Pearls before swine…which Jesus said don’t do. I wonder what he was thinking? Did he pretend they were college kids? Did he get to the point that he just talked to God? Did he tie his significance so much to what he did that he could keep doing it when no one cared anymore what he said?

I care about what I’m doing, but I’m beginning to have that feeling that I will never feel significant in a community of believers as I have in the past. I am, in a very real way, a “homeless” man in communities where either I cannot be fully myself or I must do what I do with no real interaction because it is all compulsory. I’m losing the ability to know if I’m making any sense, if I suck, if I need to get out of the way, if I’m just too old for this, etc.? It’s like the dashboard has quit and I can’t trust the information in front of me any more.

Ahhh….mid-life and empty nest. It is a big, deep, dark hole. Anyone got a light down here?